Tag Archives: Ineptitude

David Stockman documents the continuing depression and affixes blame where it belongs. From Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

President Obama says that the feckless world leaders who squandered their taxpayers’ money on last week’s G-7 junket to Japan are “rattled” by Donald Trump.

Bully for the Donald!

These clowns need to be rattled—-right to their very bones. And we might as well start with our own snake oil salesman-in-chief.

It seems that Obama can’t stop taking bows for the awesome recovery he claims to have presided over and the 14 million new jobs he claims to have created. Yet that’s as big a whopper as anything that Trump has ever let fly.

In fact, at the February 2008 peak prior to the crisis, the BLS reported 138.5 million nonfarm payroll jobs compared to 143.9 million in April 2016. The net gain is thus only 5.6 million, and it means nearly 9 million or 61% of the 14 million new jobs our President has been crowing about are not “new” at all.

Actually, they were “born-again” jobs, and even then they consist of lower paying and lesser quality jobs than the ones obliterated during the crash and so-called Great Recession.

For instance, there has been a loss of 2.3 million goods-producing jobs in manufacturing, mining/energy and construction, paying an average of $58,000 per year; and these have been swapped for 1.9 million jobs in leisure and hospitality paying less than $20,000 per year.

The White House may have somehow buried this in its awesome economy fibs, but it was surely noticed out in Flyover America where Trump has been striking a deep nerve of justifiable discontent.

Needless to say, with an adult population that has grown from 233 million to 253 million since the eve of the crisis, the net 5.6 million of primarily low-quality/low pay jobs created since then don’t cut it. Behind all the White House bombast about jobs and recovery, there is a stinging rebuke embedded in even the BLS’ highly medicated and surely exaggerated jobs counts.

To wit, the US economy has been creating net new jobs at the paltry rate of 56,000 per month over the last eight years, or at one-fourth the 200,000 per month growth rate of the labor force.

That actually represents a worsening of the trend that has been underway since the turn of the century. There are still fewer prime age workers between 25 and 54 years holding full-time jobs than there were 16 years ago.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the employment-to-population rate remains in the sub-basement of modern history, and that among the most vulnerable elements of the labor force it has actually gone down for the count.

As shown below, the employment rate for workers with high school diplomas but no college dropped from 60.5% before the crisis to 54.5% during the Great Recession; but since then it has not recovered one bit. That is, $800 billion worth of un-shovel ready fiscal stimulus and $3.5 trillion worth of Fed bond buying has had no impact, at all.

Nor is it owing to the aging demographics of the baby-boom generation as per the standard Keynesian meme. For want of doubt, the graph also shows that the participation rate of workers over 65 years has rising sharply since 2008.

To continue reading: Rattle Me This—–So What If The G-7 Fools Are Uncomfortable?